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NT-SwiFT: Software Implemented Fault Tolerance for Windows NT
Yennun Huang, P. Emerald Chung, and Chandra Kintala, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies; Chung-Yih Wang and De-Ron Liang, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
More and more high available applications are implemented on Windows NT. However, the current version of Windows NT (NT4) does not provide some facilities that are needed to implement these fault tolerant applications. In this paper, we describe a set of components collectively named NT-SwiFT (Software Implemented Fault Tolerance) which facilitates building fault-tolerant and highly available applications on Windows NT. NT-SwiFT provides components for automatic error detection and recovery, checkpointing, event logging and replay, communication error recovery, incremental data replications, IP packets re-routing, etc. SwiFT components were originally designed on UNIX. The UNIX version was first ported to NT to run on UWIN [Korn97]. Gradually a large portion of the software has been re-implemented to take advantage of native NT system services. This paper describes these components and compares the differences in the UNIX and NT implementations. We also describe some applications using these components and discuss how to leverage NT system services and cope with some missing features.
author = {Yennun Huang and P. Emerald Chung and Chandra Kintala and De-Ron Liang and Chung-Yih Wang},
title = {{NT-SwiFT}: Software Implemented Fault Tolerance for Windows {NT}},
booktitle = {2nd USENIX Windows NT Symposium (2nd USENIX Windows NT Symposium)},
year = {1998},
address = {Seattle, WA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/2nd-usenix-windows-nt-symposium/nt-swift-software-implemented-fault-tolerance-windows-nt},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}